As it becomes increasingly clear that Donald Trump may have violated the Espionage Act by keeping “top secret” government documents in his private residence, the former president has turned to a familiar excuse: Obama did it, too.
“President Barack Hussein Obama maintains 33 million pages of documents, much of which are classified. How many of these relate to nuclear power? The word is, a lot!” Trump posted on his social media platform on Friday.
But shortly after, Fox News’ main political anchor Brett Baier went out of his way to inform viewers that anything Trump said was worthless.
“There is a process,” Baier explained, noting that President Obama “followed those processes to get those documents to Chicago.” While “there was a lot of grumbling that they weren’t posted online as promised,” he said, “the way they were handled was done by that process.”
“President Obama’s documents were processed properly,” Baier added. “And the question is, is there a paper trail and a process for these documents, if that’s what Trump’s lawyers and the former president are claiming.”
Specifically, Trump claims that he personally “declassified” all of the documents in question — recalling Michael Scott’s bankruptcy filing on The Office — but as Bayer also noted on Fox Friday afternoon, it’s not that simple.
“Now that’s a big power that the president has, a broad power to declassify, but there’s also regulations that have to, a process has to take place,” he explained. “It’s not like you wave a stick and say all these boxes are declassified.”
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